There but for the grace of God

This morning my manager asked to step inside a conference room with him and his manager. The company hadn’t been doing well, my division in particular. The former was mostly because of disorganization, the latter because there simply wasn’t enough work for all the employees. The fat needed to be trimmed. I knew I hadn’t been pulling my weight both because so little was assigned to me (I was the new guy after all) and because I had grown lethargic and lax in what little I did. I was told my sort-of-manager (to whom I’d been making unfulfilled promises to get my shit in order) was let go, as was another employee on loan to our sister company. The second I had gone to college with, though we weren’t in any of the same classes. He remembered seeing me on campus, I had no memory of him. I was replacing him because I had just been given responsibility over one feature of our software. I hadn’t shown any special competence at it and if I had been in charge I would have canned me (or my analogue, since being in charge is generally incompatible with being entry-level) a while ago.

To receive a boon you do not deserve, even if is merely the avoidance of a loss, is known as “grace”. The example my pastor gave a little while ago was of a traffic court in session near the holidays in which a judge simply voided everyone’s ticket so they could go home to their families. Grace is then a violation of justice. It is getting better than you deserve. The Christian conception of undeserved bounty owed to God rather than self was the starting point for Rawls’ moral philosophy as a young man, and that disregard for desert survived the purging of God from his thinking. Desert has tended to lose its luster as we entered a more scientific age in which God plays less of a role. A rare outspoken atheist who forthrightly defends desert is Bryan Caplan. This should not be terribly surprising as he also believes in objective morality, Cartesian dualism and genuine free will. Even he is offended by the undeserved good fate of first-worlders, and likely would be for those born after Malthus if he considered it.

What are the implications of abandoning desert? Joshua Greene & Jonathan Cohen explain when it comes to our conception of legal justice here. It does not mean we absolve people of their acts because they couldn’t help it. It may mean punishing people for things they didn’t do. A good example of someone who jumps to unsupported conclusions based on grace is Lew Daly of the Demos Institute. I’m not really a fan (I’d have to take Rawls specifically and moral philosophy in general more seriously), but I have to acknowledge that Will Wilkinson cuts to the nub in his response to Daly’s egalitarianism. That I do not deserve my good fortune does not imply that everyone else deserves any of it either. We cannot even conclude that it is better for me to have less even if nobody else receives more as a result. Even when he have conscious knowledge regarding the workings of the brain and its determination in genetics, we intuitively think there must be a residual “Ghost in the machine” somewhat like a God of the gaps, and so when we trace causality back and find something other than the Ghost, we deem the lucky sod a recipient of stolen goods. But if there is no Ghost then there is no theft, and once we abandon desert we cannot use it as a standard to indict the graced.

If we are to set up a system of rewards and punishments we are left with the guidelines of ensuring more of what we want and less of what we don’t. If you are to be upset at the high compensation of investment bankers it should be because they were not raking in millions sitting on their asses and writing software that we could get some use out of. I’m thankful that so many people are willing to create innovations whose surplus value they are greatly uncompensated for, but I don’t have much faith in supply-driven ludic or “gift” economies separated from the winner-take-at-least-a-good-deal rewards of market demand resulting in an efficient allocation of human capital. I certainly wouldn’t count on the benevolence of the garbageman and dog-catcher. I don’t think we’ll need to worry so much about our random goofy video needs though.

I suppose the pastor isn’t “mine”, just one of several at a Lutheran church I sometimes attend. As far as the people I know in meatspace are concerned, I still believe in God. I think I was 20 when I admitted to myself that I didn’t, so it’s been about 2 years. Part of that time I was in college though, when I always just slept in on Sundays.

I was not able to get Isak’s benefit from church, since my most recent pastor was unusually interesting. Also he was kind of old, and if you paid attention once in a while he would accidentally say something hilarious – like once on Easter he fucked up Mark 16:6 and read it (really emotionally) as “He is not risen, he is here!”

The only way I can think of that consequentialism and libertarianism are compatible is that you’re making the empirical claim that libertarianism happens to be the best implementation of rule utilitarianism. Is that what’s going on? Or is it consequentialism for the individual, libertarianism for the (non-)state?

I will agree with Robin Hanson that liberty is the best heuristic for efficiency we have yet discovered. I am open to the possibility of restricting liberty though. I generally take a contractarian view of things, trying to minimize negative sum fighting and increase positive sum cooperation. Respecting the liberty of others helps to do that.

Consequentialist libertarianism is more common than you might expect. You may get a kick out of this “after the revolution” flavored exchange from Reason magazine where Richard Epstein paraphrases Nixon’s famous line to the effect that we’re “all consequentialists now”:

Like David Friedman, I’m sympathetic to his consequentialism but don’t buy his conclusions. I’ve never found Epstein very persuasive (the last thing I read by him was an argument that we own our reputations and so free speech must be curtailed), nor have I thought much of Randy Barnett. Maybe because their law professors and I dislike lawyers. Epstein’s holdout problem seems easily rectified with option-clauses.

Thanks Chip – very lively. So I think I’m correct in believing that libertarian consequentialism is an empirical claim (which makes sense, since most of you guys are ultra-subjectivists anyway). Claims like this by Epstein:

Removing these ordinary activities from the thrall of government regulation should increase the tax base and thus reduce the need for taxation, while simultaneously increasing the liberty and prosperity of all. The greater level of wealth should in turn reduce the calls for redistribution of wealth by state action, which in turn will reduce if not eliminate much of the welfare state.

sounds to me rather gushing and unsupported by evidence, though – like Maoists immediately prior to the Great Leap Forward.

The libertarian opposition to redistribution also seems to be more of a deontological position than an empirical/consequentialist one. I think Friedman’s essay is the smartest, but both he and Epstein appeal to mysterious “widely shared values” that libertarianism would allegedly promote, without grounding exactly what those values are and what we should do in a case of conflict of “widely shared values.”

The moral idea of a welfare floor is widely shared – e.g., wheelchairs for handicapped orphans. Why maintaining the property status quo (no taxation) is more important than this is not clear from a consequentialist perspective. But then, I buy Rawls pretty heavily.

Yes, the case against redistribution isn’t as strong. I wouldn’t have that much of a problem with Milton Friedman’s proposed replacement of the welfare state with a negative income tax (I think Charles Murray proposed something similar later). Apparently, both Hayek and Buchanan were also okay with social safety nets. Regulation is of greater concern than redistribution. Also, as I told Isak, we cannot even know logically that private property is efficient (I say we have learned it from the mistakes of others).

I also don’t buy Epstein’s claim about reducing the demand for more government. It is entirely possible that government is a luxury good that we consume more as we become more prosperous. I think Tyler Cowen has made something like this claim.

I come to the issue with a subjective preference for liberty that I can ultimately justify only in terms of personal taste. I don’t think this can be characterized accurately as a deontological position (it’s more like a kind of free-floating egoism, or an expression of desire, or taste), but it might explain why I’m more favorably disposed toward judicial strategies like those exposited by Epstein and Barnett. I’m not really a localist, and I like the possibility that freedom-maximizing stare decesis may trickle down into the social consciousness to be reified under an assumed order of “widely shared values.” Everyone knows they have a “right to remain silent,” after all, even if only one person in five can begin to explain why.

As far as redistribution and the welfare floor go, I agree with TGGP that regulation is the bigger problem, in part because bureaucratic rules tend to be more entrenched, more static, and more self-perpetuating (Virginia Postrel has written some smart empirical stuff on this, but I don’t have time to find links). I still think there is a danger that social welfare, wherever the “floor” is set, will have unintended consequences that distort and pervert charitable incentives. Social Security appears to have profoundly affected the way families approach long-term savings, and Charles Murray’s “Losing Ground” was enough to convince me that LBJ’s good intentions gravely exacerbated the problems they sought to remedy.

I think the Murray proposal to which TGGP refers is outlined in his book, “In Our Hands,” which I never finished.

Also, re Rawls, I think TGGP has linked in the past to a neat Jeffrey Friedman essay that’s all about reconciling the presumed contradictions between Rawlsian justice and libertarian — or “post-libertarian” — theory.

I also conclude that my libertarianism reduces to my preferences. I am something like the atomistic individual of caricature. One thing that makes libertarianism stand out though is that it takes most preferences for granted rather than insisting that there are correct ones to be imposed. Jeffrey Friedman is critical of that stance and seems to prefer Burke’s insistence that we know whether what people will use freedom for is good before saying it is good to have freedom.

[…] up the will (aka executive function) to resist temptation, or if they are blessed with undeserved grace from such temptation. Turns out its the latter. If you feel bad for having lust in your heart for […]